How to Choose Typography for your WordPress Website

Typography is mostly overlooked by most web designers. This can really cost your website in both aspects of usability and design. Just like a poor web design, typography can really give you a hard time.

There are numbers of benefits a shrewd typography strategy can bring to your WordPress website design. It will increase the readability of your visitors which will result in lower bounce rates and better user-engagement as well.

In this post, we will learn about how you can choose typography and make things good for your WordPress website. Before we go any further, I want you to get aware of some typography jargons to have a better understanding of the post and the tips.

Typography Terms You Must Be Aware Of

There are many techniques that you can use to make your website exciting for your users. But before you apply any of those techniques, you need to be sure about the common terms of typography realm.

Let’s get started with the typography jargons that are commonly used,

Fonts And Type Families

There are a lot of people who are using these two terms as one, but there is a subtle difference between them. In typography, a font is a file which generates a set of characters in a typeface. Type families are the variations that show the variations of the same style. Think it as italics, bold, etc.

Tracking

Tracking is the amount of space between the characters. For example, when you define a paragraph you need to make sure that the uniformity of its line is even. You can adjust that by defining tracking between the letters.

Kerning

Kerning basically defines as the distance between the letters. It helps you to assure that the space between any two letter is consistent or not. You can customize kerning and make the spaces between the letters overlap.

Baseline

The baseline is simply an imaginary line on which your characters are sitting evenly. For uppercase letters, the descenders are either above baseline or on the baseline while in case of lowercase letters, the descenders can be below the baseline.

Leading

Leading refers to the distance between the individual baselines. It is the distance between the bottom of each line.

Tips To Improve Your Website’s Typography.

Typography always seems like an alien subject who interacts with only a few peoples but this is not the case. There are certain practices which can help you in making the best use of typography in your WordPress website. Let’s see some of the tips that can really help you in selecting the typography of your WordPress website.

Pick Perfect Font With These Guidelines

A perfect font is a termed that showed that how it defines the style of your website. A font can completely change the way of thinking of your visitor for the site. Make sure that the looks of your font are professional. Not just that, you need to take care of some other things as well. Let’s have a look at these figures,

Check for Readability: You must choose a font that is easy to read in all sizes. Before finalising anything, you must test it on multiple devices and browsers.

Compatibility: The most important part of typography is consistency. You need to be consistent throughout your website. You can use more than one font but try to be consistent with it. Do not create a bad mix of fonts.

Creativity: Most of the time a website is made from Helvetica. If you have a knack for some creativity in you and a hatred with comic sans font, you can tweak with your typography as long as you like.

Make Sure To Maintain Visual Hierarchy

The visual hierarchy of a typography is one of the major factors that can either drive a visitor to stay longer or throw him away. For an instant, think of a post with numerous subheadings. How will the post look with uneven subheadings? Terrible right?

What factors are important in order to keep the things in order? Let’s check it out here in these points,

Size of The Font is one of the most important things. Use the same font size for all subheadings. If you are using a title of 18 points, then make sure that the subheading is smaller than that say 14 points. If you are using another context, then make sure that it is smaller than 14, and all the context must be of the same size.

Using different colour and contrast will make your website very unprofessional. Choose complementary colours and make use of contrast either in the background or on the font.

Keep the texture of the typography variant. The texture here defines the visual variations of the font such as italics and bold. This will help your viewers to differentiate between different emotions you want to convey them.

WordPress Plugins For Typography

Now you know all about typography in website design. How can you implement it on your WordPress website? Simple, you make use of WordPress plugins and that is it. In this section, you will get to know about some of the WordPress plugins that will help you in leveraging the features of typography. Let’s get forward and see the engraving WordPress typography plugins,

Easy Google Fonts is an amazing WordPress plugin to use typography in a WordPress website. It gives you full control while using typography in your WP site. You just need to install and activate this plugin. Then you will see a new typography tab on your theme customizer.

With Typography tab, you can change the fonts of your WordPress website while seeing the live preview of the changes you made. Install it and enjoy customizing your WordPress website typography.

Google Font Manager is a WordPress typography plugin which will help you to use the Google fonts which you can use as typography on your WordPress website. It is very easy to operate. You just need a Google Font API Key, and there are simple instructions to operate this plugin on your WordPress website.

Over To You

So, now you have WordPress plugins too for your WordPress website. Make use of typography on your website and let your visitors have an extremely enticing experience.

What did you do to stop your visitor for long on your website? Tell me all about it in the comments section. I will get back to you as soon as possible. Till then, adios.

Author Bio:

Sarah Clarke works as a writer for Media Fortress, an web Designing Agency offering custom web design services in Melbourne. She is a web addict and spends too much time in front of the computer. When she actually manages to get away for more than 10 minutes, she is usually reading books, traveling or shooting photos. For more blogs you can follow her on Google+, Facebook, and Twitter.